Cat People (1942)

Interesting facts

• Box office: $8M
• Budget: $135K
• Earned 59.3× its budget

Cat People is a 1942 American supernatural horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced for RKO by Val Lewton. The film tells the story of Irena Dubrovna, a newly married Serbian fashion illustrator obsessed with the idea that she is descended from an ancient tribe of Cat People who metamorphose into black panthers when aroused. When her husband begins to show interest in one of his co-workers, Irena begins to stalk her. The film stars Simone Simon as Irena, and features Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, and Jack Holt in supporting roles.

Production

In March 1942, producer Val Lewton ended his working relationship with independent producer David O. Selznick to work for RKO Radio Pictures' Charles Koerner, becoming the head of a new unit created to develop B-movie horror feature films. Writing in 2009, the film critic Kim Newman compared the Lewton productions to RKO's own B-movie mystery series based on The Falcon, which were, unlike Lewton's productions, "churned out".

Lewton selected most of the film's main crew, including director Jacques Tourneur and writer DeWitt Bodeen, who all worked on the treatment. These were people Lewton had connections with through their work with Selznick, as Tourneur had worked as part of the second unit teams for Selznick's production of A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Bodeen had been a research assistant on what would become Jane Eyre (1943).

The germ of Cat People was Lewton's short story, "The Bagheeta," published in Weird Tales magazine (July 1930), about a legendary panther, a "half leopard and half woman . . . were-beast," that lives in the Caucasus mountains and plagues local farmers. Tourneur and Bodeen offered conflicting accounts as to how Cat People was conceived.

Bodeen then began researching cat-related literature, including Ambrose Bierce's "The Eyes of the Panther" and Margaret Irwin's "Monsieur Seeks a Wife". Lewton decided to base the film on Algernon Blackwood's 1906 short story "Ancient Sorceries". Blackwood's story had a contemporary setting and involved a Medieval architecture French town inhabited by a group of devil-worshipping cat people.

Simone Simon was cast in the role of Irena Dubrovna by producer Lewton. Lewton commented that, "I'd like to have a girl with a little kitten face like Simone Simon, cute and soft and cuddly and seemingly not at all dangerous." He compared his decision to the casting of Kathleen Burke in Island of Lost Souls (1932), where she portrayed the Panther Woman, stating that any attempt at securing a wild, cat-like appearance in their casting would be dis…

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